BOOK REVIEW: MICHELLE L. ELMORE ‘LET'S GO GET EM’
“Let’s Go Get ‘Em” is the common refrain of New Orleans’ colorful Mardi Gras Indians, whose ancestral dress and dances become the focal point for competition during traditional Carnival parades. The phrase makes sense as the title of artist/photographer Michelle L. Elmore’s photobook that archives the proud cultural preservation of Black Indigenous tribes, native to the area. Built upon a legacy of African-Americans in the 1800s, who found refuge and community with the Indigenous peoples of New Orleans after escaping enslavement, “Let’s Go Get ‘Em” tells a story of resilience, community, and a unique mixing of cultural traditions.”
A California transplant, Elmore made her home in New Orleans back in the 90s, and the love affair she’s had with the people, places, and subcultures of the city are skillfully reflected through a conscientious, respectful lens. This is notable because of the conversation around “the white gaze” taken up around photography, specifically ethnographic colonial photography, that oftentimes presented post-colonized Africans in subservient “primitive” poses that fascinated European viewers while playing to racist tropes. Black photographers, American and otherwise, have since turned that lens inward in a notably fair light. In the 2019 Ryerson Image Centre exhibition, “The Way She Looks: A History of Female Gazes in African Portraiture” for example, guest curator Sandrine Collard selected images from The Walther Collection that resisted the white gaze. Although focused on the representation of Black women specifically, the exhibition of contemporary Black photographers — like Zanele Muholi alongside 1950s studio portraits by trailblazers like Malick Sidibé, and nineteenth-century colonial photography — makes a case for the importance of Black subjects having agency in their representation. Elmore, as a white female photographer, accomplishes this with grace and an understanding of her subjects, worthy of appreciation.
"The Mardi Gras Indians are the heart and soul of New Orleans. I wanted to do my part and document their accomplishments so future generations recognize how important their contributions were to the people, the city, and the culture." - Michelle L. Elmore
It’s obvious to me that the aforementioned closeness to her subjects comes from how she integrated her art into the tapestry of community. After suffering the loss of both grandparents, Elmore decamped to New Orleans with her son, a place she had become familiar with over a decade of regular trips to the region. Her photographs of the immediate community and the pageantry of the “second line” parade circuit — the second line referring to the procession of either mourners or celebrants at a funeral or wedding — garnered Elmore a little money and local notoriety. But most importantly, it granted Elmore access into the lives and cultural norms of her new community, which would come to know her as “The Picture Lady” or just “Me-Shell”. This eventually brought her into contact with the Mardi Gras Indians, who today number over 40 different tribes in the New Orleans area. The images in “Let’s Go Get ‘Em” were taken by Elmore before the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the negatives were fortunately untouched. However, everything else Elmore owned was lost, and she decided to leave New Orleans and start over with just $69 to her name.
As an artist in the community, Elmore owned a gallery and was a restaurateur with a 24-hour grill in the French Quarter. As such, this book is just part of a larger catalog of work monumentalizing the people of New Orleans, which includes “Ya Heard Me”, and “Come See About Me” — work that would be easy to say presents itself in the spirit of Nan Goldin, another photographer who was less of an outside observer than part of an extended family within her circle. I believe Alice Neel, although a painter, could also be considered a forebear in terms of her closeness to subjects and the care she took in presenting them in a real, but respectful light. She sees the people of New Orleans, including the Mardi Gras Indians who entrusted her with their cultural image, as neighbors and contemporaries with lives worthy of dignified documentation.
Elmore’s lens captures the spirit, energy, and pride of the Mardi Gras Indians. Without seeing the production of these elaborate regalia, her images evoke a sense of how laborious and expensive the assemblage of each outfit would be. There must be blood from pricked fingers, sweat from the time-consuming work of master craftsmanship, and tears of frustration and joy during the challenge, or upon its completion. Casting her lens on the material and the human, Elmore is an artist revealing the artistry inherent within Mardi Gras and the people who fuel the celebration. Polychromatic plumage, intricate beading, glitter, and rhinestones, interplay with various displays of face paint. Elmore reveals the weight of the multilayered garb as more than a vain act of peacocking. By capturing little moments of genetic memory through the euphoric celebration of the dancers, the physical weight of the regalia can be imagined, but the dancers themselves seem weightless and ebullient. They are buoyed by a freedom that likely recalls the joy of ancestors who escaped enslavement and the Indigenous populations who lived in congruence with the land before a “New Orleans” ever existed.
By Byron Armstrong Award Winning Writer & Journalist
TO PURCHASE MICHELLE L. ELMORE’S BOOK ‘LET’S GO GET EM’ PLEASE VISIT THE LINK BELOW:
https://artvoicesbooks.com/instoresnow/michelle-l-elmore-lets-go-get-em
